THE SPHINX

Thus their case for the lost civilization rests, ultimately, on angularity. Schoch, however, never shows any other examples of wind or rain weathering so that we can judge the Giza profiles by comparison. If he did, we would then be interested in how he establishes rates of erosion to demonstrate that the Sphinx was built between 5000 and 7000 B.C. Even if the Sphinx were eroded by rain, Schoch never demonstrates why the rainfall over the last 4,500 years would not be sufficient to round off the corners. We have been caught in many downpours during our work at Giza over the last 20 years. Schoch must present more evidence than a few photographs and some video animation to make the case that these different erosional patterns are chronologically significant. To point simply to the "morphology of the rock"--that is, "the way it looks" --is not enough to convince us of the enormous ramifications that West and Schoch attach to this distinction.

Another problem with Schoch's comparison between the Sphinx and "the exact same layers" in the Old Kingdom tomb concerns the location of the two. The Sphinx sits at the lowest part of the plateau, around 63 feet above sea level, and close to the damp Nile floodplain that today is about 55 to 59 feet above sea level.

Schoch does not tell the audience that those Debehen tomb layers are much higher and drier, 458 yards (more than four football fields) out in the desert west-southwest of the Sphinx, at an elevation between 154 and 206 feet above sea level. Between the Sphinx and the tomb of Debehen there are numerous rock-cut tombs and, most significant, a yawning open-air quarry 250 yards wide, from which Khufu probably took much of the stone for his pyramid. Correlating stratigraphic layers from the Sphinx to the tomb of Debehen is not as easy as Schoch, or Heston's script, would have us believe.